Essay

Throughout your architectural design process it is often the case that you need different tools at different points in time as you design. While some tools help you to visualize what goes on during your personalized architecture process, others help you to visualize what will go on within your final building design. So, what happens when these two worlds start to merge? Will your design visualizations be as immersive as the actual methods you use to communicate your designs to clients and other team members?

At different phases during your design process you explore different things. You engage in different levels of refinement and you solve an array of problems and questions that all have project-wide consequences and effects. You probably use a combination of both digital media information visualizations and 3D modeling methods. In fact, many architects today are delving into 4D information modeling techniques involving BIM leading-edge tools.

Whatever the case, it is paramount that your digital media design tools help to streamline your own architecture process. And a key to this is to make sure these tools are intuitive and promote creative thinking.

Digital Media Tools that Dig into the Minds of Your Occupants

Design project tools that reduce redundancy, error and cost during your architectural design process can go a long way toward increasing the quality and reducing the cost of your building — while also increasing the actual speed with which you can design. But there are a few things that come to mind when questioning how these tools can evolve, to get even better.

What if your architectural design tool could also help you extract information about occupant behaviors, perhaps algorithmically? Furthermore, what if you could inject this information into your building design visualization models? Hence, it would become a preview of not only what your design will look like, but also how it will function once built.

Would this pulling of occupant information allow you to spot new kinds of design errors? Would it further allow you to see aspects to your design that you otherwise did not think of, or simply missed? And in an ideal world, what other information do you wish you could pull into your architecture visualizations? What would their new capabilities allow you to “see” or “construct”?

In an age where we can easily pull data from repositories of information like the internet and other databases, new “models” can be built to help you and your firm with your architectural design processes. It is important for you to understand your current design flow, and then to be aware of what added dimensions would be most helpful to make it stronger.

The key is to “visualize” that which is almost intangible, pool from our era’s developing resources and then to implement tools that help us push architecture, as a discipline, that much further.

Image Credit: © Ben Chau | Flickr